Why you really DON'T need to teach your kids about nutrition
Like, at all.
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On teaching kids nutrition…
I understand the dilemma. Here we are trying to teach our kids about math, reading, kindness, not perpetuating racism, protecting their bodily autonomy, processing emotions in a constructive way...the list often seems never-ending.
Why wouldn’t making food decisions that promote long-term health also be something we should be teaching our kids?
Pile onto this how so many of us are pretty sure that the way we learned about food growing up didn’t work out so well in terms of our relationships with food, so we’re looking for a specific, actionable alternative.
Statements like “red foods help your heart” or “some foods do a little for your body while others do a lot” seem innocuous, no? They’re significantly better than “that food is unhealthy” Right..?
[My hot take on why teaching kids what foods do for our bodies based on their colors is a risky endeavor.]
What we really have to do is bring this back to is why we believe it's so important to teach kids to understand nutrition concepts from such a young age at all.
Surely, it would be irresponsible not to teach our kids to be good stewards of their health through diet, no? There must be some positive way to do it, right??
Unfortunately, I think this frantic search for the perfect way to talk to kids about food comes back to fear. Fear that our children will be subject to the diet-related diseases we’re constantly seeing headlines about, and absolutely, fear that our children will make the wrong food decisions, become fat, and be subject to all of the unjust treatment people in fat bodies currently receive.
[My colleague Crystal Karges, RD’s critique via Instagram remix of a recent Kids Eat in Color reel that encourages teaching children that broccoli does more for our bodies than chocolate.]
This may not be at the forefront of our minds. I imagine you’re thinking what most of my clients do: “I just want my kid to be healthy!” But when we chase this ball down the road...our fears of fatness and disease are where we ultimately wind up.
Listen, I want my kids to be healthy too! And please don't get me wrong – I would absolutely hope that any young adult would be able to make decisions around food that promote their well-being in the same way that I would hope any young adult would have the skills to earn a living and keep a roof over their own head.
But when we subtly try to influence a child's food decisions with this type of coded information about some foods doing “a lot” for their bodies while others do “a little,” we are punting our responsibilities as their caregivers into their courts (listen, sports talk is not my forte...)
It is not your child's responsibility to select a well-balanced diet any more than it is their responsibility to pay your household bills.
It is not your child's responsibility to select a well-balanced diet any more than it is their responsibility to pay your household bills. As their caregivers, we are in charge of the “what, when and where” of the food our kids ultimately eat. This is for so many reasons, from logistics to budgeting to cleanliness to, yes, nutritional balance.
This principle, called Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility (DOR), is often co-opted to restrict children into eating with diet culture has deemed a “healthy” diet (if the parent chooses the “what,” then it’s quinoa salad or bust) but that couldn’t be further from the actual intention behind DOR.
More than anything, our responsibilities with the “what” of food when using DOR is to care for our children and help them build an unshakable trust that the availability of enough food, foods they enjoy and foods that will sustain them and support their growth is not something they need to worry about at this stage in their young lives.
So when we come in with nutrition information that subtly positions some foods as more valuable than others, suddenly the “what” of foods becomes something that they do need to worry about.
And this is how disordered relationships with food begin, because little kids do not yet possess the capacity for abstract thought necessary to understand all the nuances of the pursuit of health. As concrete thinkers, they can interpret the information we deliver about some foods being “better” than others - no matter how we position this information - as being better themselves when they eat those foods.
Per DOR, our children's responsibilities with food are to choose “whether” to eat the food at all and if so “how much.” What no one is saying here is that with this coded nutrition talk is that we are, indeed, actually trying to influence our kids’ “whether” and “how much” choices. And that's a blatant violation of the Division of Responsibility.
What no one is saying here is that with this coded nutrition talk is that we are, indeed, actually trying to influence our kids’ “whether” and “how much” choices. And that's a blatant violation of the Division of Responsibility.
What I find especially fascinating about this issue is that most of the creators who encourage this type of coded food talk are also some of the Division of Responsibility’s biggest supporters.
Now, I don't personally think that everything Ellyn Satter has ever written is untouchable, but I do think that she and the Satter Institute have given us an excellent starting place for how to help our children develop a healthy relationship with food. And most creators who endorse her principles believe the same!
The Satter Institute has always been very clear that in order for children to get the most benefit out of the Division of Responsibility, it’s important to keep nutrition talk out of food conversations with kids until about age twelve or thirteen, when the capacity for abstract thought develops.
So I find it fairly mind-boggling that although this is a critical component of Satter’s Trust Model, the same creators who tout the benefits of DOR are also encouraging parent to subtlety plant ideas in children’s minds about some foods being better than others.
From Satter’s 2008 book, “Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family”:
Why would children want to learn these rules? Provided they are being offered regular and nutritious meals and snacks in a positive environment, children have within them far more sophisticated mechanisms for achieving nutritional adequacy … For a young child, learning how to choose food and how to regulate food intake is like learning how to breathe. It doesn't arise. The food is there; you eat it or you don't eat it, and you eat as much or as little as you want.
Children naturally explore, learn, and grow. Warnings about food impede their exploration. To cope, they become rigid and try to live by rules that are to them illogical, ignore them completely, or give up and become rebellious (appendix H, p. 256).
The entire goal of using the Division of Responsibility in childhood is for a child to have countless opportunities to experience what food feels like in their bodies and be able to intuitively make decisions about food that will ultimately support their well-being without being influenced by external influences such as thinking about what the nutritional value of a food is.
That's not to say we should never teach children about nutrition as they enter their teenage years and prepare to become adults. We absolutely want teens to have the food preparation and selection skills that they will need to feed themselves well and ultimately feed their own families. This is a principle that Satter supports as well.
The 12 to 13 year old begins to think abstractly which means she can learn basic food selection principles and apply those principles to deciding what to eat. That allows her to start, ever so gradually, mastering your what when and where roles jobs with feeding (Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, p. 62).
In other words, as she nears adulthood, the child begins to have the cognitive ability to understand the practice of building a meal that will meet her nutritional needs in the same way she’s ready to learn about budgeting or taking on the responsibilities of a part-time job.
And no, this is not the time to introduce “healthy/unhealthy” messages and I still wouldn't recommend the business about “some foods do more for you.” But, this can certainly be the time to introduce a child to the concepts of protein, carbohydrate and fat, discuss how the human body needs all three of them to thrive and teach how to plan meals featuring each of these components.
Heck, you could even bring in the concept of how, generally speaking, fruit and vegetable consumption has been shown to contribute to positive health outcomes. But ideally, you are doing so with a child who has already established a neutral relationship with fruits and vegetables. With this foundation, intentionally planning produce into their diets as adults becomes less of a directive and truly more of a delight because they already know the types of produce they enjoy.
With this foundation, intentionally planning [produce] into their diets as adults becomes less of a directive and truly more of a delight because they already know the types of produce they enjoy.
And isn't that the whole goal here? To raise kids who enjoy a health-promoting dietary pattern that works for their own tastes and lifestyles without being influenced by what they should and shouldn't choose to eat?
Why do we insist on corrupting this possibility from such an early age with nutrition talk?
Sadly, although we recognize that the “healthy/unhealthy” talk has gotten the adult generation loads of emotional baggage around food, I think we are so enchanted by this supposedly “positive” nutrition talk because we still don't trust our kids to have the ability to make these kinds of decisions, either today from the food we provide or decades down the line when they become adults.
We don't trust them to do it because we still don't trust ourselves to do it.
This isn't our fault. It's all we've ever learned from diet culture - that humans can’t be trusted to feed themselves, that we must rely on external rules and data to make the right food decisions.
But where has that gotten us?
At this point in the conversation, I often hear, “That's all well and good, Diana, but today's food environment is highly engineered to be so palatable. Don't these foods override our intrinsic ability to self-select a health promoting diet? Don’t we need some form of external controls?”
But again, I think this comes back to fear. The fear that comes from a lifetime of learning that food is out to get you, that your appetite will make you fat and fat is the worst thing you could be. But food is not out to get you. Plenty of people, whether fat or thin, can roll the bag of chips back up when eating any more wouldn't feel good, or plan vegetables into their meals not in an effort to be "good," but simply because they enjoy them.1
You and your kids are not some exception to this intrinsic human skill. The reason that I am in this business, that I am writing this essay, is that I fully believe it's within you.
And hey, now that you don't have to worry about learning the exact right way to teach your kids about nutrition, maybe you’ll have more time to focus on that - enjoying your food and having positive food experiences with your kids!
If that feels especially challenging, I have a variety of resources linked below to help you through it.
Thanks for reading, friends. It’s not an easy intersection to navigate...embrace the mess.
Resources and more:
Check out my free download about using the Division of Responsibility in an anti-diet way.
Join my free Facebook group, Raising Anti-Diet Kids, for a supportive community of parents working to break the cycle of food and body shame.
Follow @anti.diet.kids on Instagram for simple tips on feeding kids and reframing your language about food and bodies.
Explore my child feeding coaching and adult intuitive eating coaching services.
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Choosing to put away the chips or intentionally eat vegetables is not a designation of morally superior eating and food autonomy means that if an adult wants to eat any combination of any food, whether vegetables or fries, they have every right to simply eat that way. My point here is that humans absolutely possess the ability make informed decisions with food that support feeling well in our bodies - whatever that looks like for each individual.